Past Master

Gerhard Richter

When I see Gerard Richter's work, I hardly know what to call it. But I know somehow that I have to reach for a name, for something so beautiful and yet so perilously familiar. I shall start the search for an answer in a single gallery show, but it takes a career retrospective to see how the questions themselves begin.

What hit me?

So what name shall I use? All-over painting? Not when underpainting stands so ready to erupt from the central channel. An outpouring of paint? Not when the layered surface attests to an almost glacial care. Process art, then? Not when a squeegee effaces its traces.

So forget the classy conceptual categories. Slate grays? Not when the metal support and layered oils create a texture that puts that metaphor on trial. So avoid metaphors. Monochromes? Not when color fills the eye.

Abstraction? Not while the mind, like the painted surface, cry out in denial.

Something unique, then? Not when Richter has deliberately repeated himself for so long, and indeed one no longer knows if he quotes abstraction or his own confrontation with it.

So an artist's long personal history? But one no longer knows if the history is his own or Modernism's—or even if it has safely entered the past. The viewer's dilemma instead? Perhaps, but call it the puzzle of now having to confront my own history, too.

Richter's painting refuses the avant-garde baggage of self-expression, but not a personal signature and a relationship to a larger culture. Irony and beauty may do battle, but that just gives them a way to live together quite comfortably. Modernism's old foes become Postmodernism's best of friends—the postmodern paradox.

Postmodernism's heated pool

Richter has a decided virtuosity, the skill of an artist equally at home in photorealism and abstraction. He can comment on painting as well as a high formalist, but from a distance that any postmodernist would envy. His use of color, clarity, and gesture has in turn influenced even a photographer like Thomas Struth. And he can do it all without succumbing to sarcasm or dismissal. Art and irony can still matter, because they get along together after all.

Richter's work certainly has all the trappings of irony. His landscapes have the photorealist panache of Richard Estes or Chuck Close, but the photographs they evoke are blurry. No one could mistake these paintings for a window onto reality. For that matter, no one could mistake photography for such a window once he is done. In his abstractions, meanwhile, he applies the gestures of all-over painting, but with a squeegee.

A show in 2001 concentrated on an old subject of his—near monochromes. Slate grays again wipe across a surface. Below lie bright colors, as seemingly random as only non-geometric composition can be. They accentuate the coarse-grained fabric and metal sheets used as ground. Paint reflects on its materials, just as Clement Greenberg might demand of Jackson Pollock, but the reflections and materials alike have a commercial veneer.

So why are these so gorgeous, and how can paint still matter so much? In Richter's hand, canvas grain adds a barely palpable texture, metal an eerie sheen. His thick, almost casual flow of paint leaves small pools to collect light where the gray sinks down. As one steps back, color appears even more strongly, like rich valleys in the stark landscape. Gray and ground announce uniformity of surface. The pools refuse it, like a place for the eye to bathe.

The paintings depend on clear, almost mechanical layering. Only the layers themselves, optically and physically, undermine each other and themselves. Painting becomes a window or mirror after all, but a clouded glass that represents its shine. So what if Richter pulls tricks with mirrors? One appreciates them all the more from seeing the mirror as one more part of the trick.

Richter has done grays before. As he looks back on the history of abstraction, he repeats his own history. He makes one see modern art as object of attack and yet in his own image. He sustains the present by a battle with the past that brings its strategies newly alive.

Where can one begin?

If that give and take between Modernism and Postmodernism seems never-ending, where exactly did it start? Critics have put more one movement after another on both sides of the fence. When Julian Schnabel made his film about Andy Warhol, he could have been wondering at the place of both, decades apart, between styles and generations. Where can one even begin?

Neo-Expressionism struck at gesture but also reveled in it. Before that, Minimalism had made modernist sculpture impossible while reviving its geometry, its refusal of a pedestal, its invitation to the viewer, and even something of its grandeur. And so on. Perhaps Serge Guilbaut had it right when he spoke of New York's "stealing" modern art, only the chain of thefts began before Abstract Expressionism—and has never ended. No wonder Richter looks like an Old Master.

Only that adds yet another dilemma. How long has Richter—or anyone—had to agonize over painting to get there? How long before a painter's sharp eye, appetite for self-criticism, and unsparing wit gain the experience to turn flippancy into irony? And how much longer, in turn, is that possible to maintain? How long before beauty turns into sentiment and irony into just one more art institution? At last, at New York's Museum of Modern Art, one has the chance to find out.

Richter acts at once icily contemporary and chillingly old-fashioned. In an art world of Biennials like shopping plazas, dominated by computer simulations alongside video art and anything in between, I know few other painters still worth the time to puzzle out.

Stranger still, as if to insist on his currency despite it all, it took him years before he could pull off. He first had to learn to distinguish beautiful from painterly, reflection from nostalgia, and irony from cleverness. At his exhausting retrospective, one hardly notices when the thrill first starts to kick in—and by then it runs the risk of vanishing yet again.

Richter's retrospective covers almost forty years and 185 works. It turns out that his ideas came early, but their execution took time. It turns out, too, that he can get too self-involved and way too easy on his own emotions behind the art—and his public's. But then one should never stop watching the struggle. After all, I had loved those, er, what do you call 'ems just a few months ago.

Too clever by half

Richter refuses even to show work from before his thirties. Like Barnett Newman, who burned early paintings, he thus began his career with a properly Modernist dream of rebirth. As a child in Nazi Germany, he knew the temptations of a false rebirth, too, a nation's sacrifice to the common evil. As a student in East Germany, he lived in a society more cynical about repression, including the propriety of an art-school education. It shows in the calculated way he plugs away at realism all while treating skill as a mechanical device. It may show, too, in huge, hand-painted color charts from his late thirties, as if the rules of painting had to be stared down once and for all.

Actually, his twin trademark styles turn up in the retrospective's first room but on a small scale, like tryouts for one's first school play. An abstraction amounts to gray paint half-seriously applied and then casually forced down with his squeegee. He also starts collecting and projecting photographs, so that he can trace them, perfect his photorealism, and then lose it in a blur. Does he now hit stride or instead reenact in quotes the dream of a fresh start? Doing both at once is again all just part of the game.

Even so, one has to wade through plenty of merely intriguing art. A hart in a landscape looks like the underlying sketch for a mural in any number of German traditions. But no, this one is supposed to look like a cartoon. Just in case one missed the point, a big swatch of background laps over the animal. Well, okay. That alone could make one yearning for contemporary abstract art.

The color charts, at least, truly do look monumental—and get one thinking longer. They pick up geometric abstraction, but as something out of a reference book. They take on Pop Art's voracious appetite for appropriation ever since Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, and his combines, but without an interest in a culture outside the production of color. They inspired the austere vision of color set free by Donald Batchelor. Yet like the lush Brushstrokes by Roy Lichtenstein, they offer a dizzying vista of handmade art stuck in its own self-reproduction.

Do they, too, seem too clever by half? By now, that cleverness is starting to make one linger, as if unsure how many halves it could possibly take to make painting whole.

I had the same leery fascination with his early photorealism, just as I had kept my distance from Struth's brilliant photographs. A woman in shimmering fabric, all the gaudier for a monochrome of electric blue as witty as any by Ross Bleckner, walks down stairs. Richter offers up his nude descending a staircase, only she wears clothes. Once again the illusions of life and of a flat surface, realism and Modernism alike, become subject to representation. Newman said that "an artist paints so that he will have something to look at." Richter paints to sort out the scraps of all that he cannot escape seeing.

Distance learning

Richter pays tribute to Marcel Duchamp's mix of Cubism with multiple-frame, stop-action photography, only the photograph simply sits still. He recalls Modernism's aspirations to a stand shockingly apart, only as fashion statement. A second version, in full color, of a woman without clothes may work even better. Instead of a nude, one has the awkward materiality of a naked human being.

Works like these plays with a male viewer's all-too-comfortable desire from the moment art puts women on display. No wonder it has had such an influence even on artists embedded firmly in American pop culture, such as Judith Eisler. Indeed, Richter hints that art quite by itself tempts one to a sense of superiority.

One gets up close to catch a realist's delicious virtuosity or an expressionist's way with paint, only to find nothing but blue haze. One walks back, the studied connoisseur, to watch it come into focus and assume the sublime dimensions of postwar art, but of course it never does. One has nowhere left to stand, and yet the work's temptations remain. These paintings connect desire to distance. They could represent a viewer's nostalgia for a past to call one's own. In fact, Richter keeps returning to voyeurism and personal history.

A student—of goodness knows what—spreads her crotch. A woman's close-up has the bland look and quarter turn of a yearbook photo, as perhaps it was. A wall-sized series blows up faces from Germany's past, all clipped right out of an encyclopedia. The Modern arranges these by the stairs to the exhibition's second floor, as if daring visitors to look back to something left behind.

When Richter speaks of Germany, he addresses his own life, too, in a way that puts younger artists confronting the Holocaust to shame. In my favorite, Uncle Rudi, who died in World War II, stands before a wall, like a man at his own firing squad, wearing his Nazi uniform and a broad grin. The foolish smile has the warmth of a dear, lost relative. It has all the naïveté of a young man about to discover the reality of fascism and war.

Richter never loses his fascination with distance. He makes a troubled realist like Close seem positively at home with brushstrokes. It shows in the blurred vision. It shows in the effort with which he paints out his most lavish abstractions. It shows in his silent invitation to take history as potentially one's own, his, a nation's, modern art's, or no one's at all. And yet what helps him beyond the simply clever is a growing need to engage the present as well.

The politics of appearances

I felt it in his return to abstraction. He lets drops of bright color spatter as if released from a long, brooding captivity. I felt it, too, in his photorealism's turns from the reference books, at first with clouds. They hover at an uncertain distance, all but in one's lap. The more ominous they appear, the more they ask if rain could ever serve as a physical release.

They feel more at home with Richter's trademark blurring, as if realism and abstraction could finally meet. They mark, too, a newfound temptation to go for greeting-card art, despite the quotation marks. He sometimes forgets how much he needs the punctuation to sustain the beauty.

As the artist gets older, the references to desire and death come more into the present. A pair of candles blends a momento mori with the artist's most polished, richly colored illusion. A profile of his wife, Lesende (Reading), lingers over light falling on hair and clothes. She reads, a young woman with an inner world never free of Richter's desires.

These late works border on sentimentality. A portrait of his child recalls the nostalgia of snapshots without the irony. Still, by then the show's cumulative impact has its own amazement. I myself found my desires on trial with Lesende, and I could not tear myself away.

In Richter's finest work, he understands culture as neither safely at a distance or safely in one's heart. His series based on the Baader-Meinhof gang, dead or alive, comes a decade after the events. It acknowledges Germany as very much caught up in bitter struggles over past and present. Its blur addresses the possibility of pinning art down to a single day of terror. It revives and represents a nation's heated debate almost at the very moment that troubled memories were about to die.

A beautiful, smiling young woman on her way to prison, the barely recognizable blur of a crowded funeral, the stark shape of a corpse lying face up—they all suggest the temptation to take appearances for salvation. But then art, too, long had the promise of a revolution—and now, with Postmodernism, can all too often bask in the allure of its own futility.

Modernism's final irony

Modernism, people used to say, hinges on self-reflection. The avant-garde looks within, goes the legend, rather than to norms. Painting, in an infamous decree, reflects on itself, its materials, and its making.

Richter may well epitomize the postmodern artist, the glib sort eager to give it all an extra twist. Or does he?

He looks outward, but only to reflect on Modernism as a part of his own past—and a far larger, contested past as well. And he does so without ever forgetting that Modernism did the same long before.

It makes for an art at once meditative and showy. It begs for a critical spirit unable to let the present moment die. It asks to be considered a past master, but at the risk of having mastered only what it has left behind. It risks, too, a present well past the point of mastery.

Beauty and irony, it turns out, may be at odds, but in the sense of an old couple who have fought for so long that everyone around them ceased to notice ages ago. In their own crazy way, they get along just fine.

It appears that metaphors pop into the experience of this art whether one will or no. Can that be its greatest lesson? Perhaps that is the beauty of art ever since Edouard Manet—or its final irony.

jhaber@haberarts.com

Gerhard Richter's retrospective ran at The Museum of Modern Art through May 21, 2002, his show a few months before at Marian Goodman through October 27, 2001.